NOVANEWS
-
Bahour says Palestinians will call for secular democracy after statehood initiative fails
-
‘NYT’ columnist cites Congressional unanimity on Gaza slaughter–and embraces ‘J Street’ to ‘balance’ lobby
-
Meet Debbie Schlussel, who says Norway’s ‘HAMAS Youth’ got what was coming to them
-
Code Pink confronts Howard Berman on boycott (and makes Hava Nagila anti-Zionist)
-
Iran, Hamas, and the Holocaust = justification for apartheid
-
Listening to the voices on ‘Arutz Sheva’
-
Historian asks Netanyahu about Zionism and colonialism
-
The case against circumcision
-
Tough language
Bahour says Palestinians will call for secular democracy after statehood initiative fails
Aug 05, 2011
Matthew Taylor
Sam Bahour argues persuasively in The Guardian that one secular state is both the best – and the only – option.
Once this foredoomed move toward Palestinian membership in the UN runs its course, a new paradigm will take root, one that Israel dreads because it implicitly views Palestinians and Israelis as equals, as co-citizens, as partners. This new shift will see Palestinians dropping their desire for independent statehood in a fraction of their historic homeland and instead will find them, within a genuinely representative political structure, articulating their desire for self-determination within their historic homeland, even if that homeland today is called Israel.
The Palestinians are about to come full circle. They were correct, painfully so, to call for a secular democratic state at the outset of this conflict. Sadly, they wasted precious time and lost too many lives trying to accept unjust modalities of a resolution.
‘NYT’ columnist cites Congressional unanimity on Gaza slaughter–and embraces ‘J Street’ to ‘balance’ lobby
Aug 05, 2011
Philip Weiss
Nicholas Kristof has a column in the Times praising J Street as an antidote to the Israel lobby and warning that the two-state solution is slipping away. He sees J Street as bringing “balance” to our discourse, and calls Jewish Voice for Peace a “leftist group.” The piece is remarkable for its flat rendition of the totalitarian state of the discourse on Israel/Palestine, but stops short of a deeper understanding. But it also reveals the new liberal consensus: We have to take on the Israel lobby to bring about the two-state solution, in Obama’s second term. We will politicize the issue, somewhat, so that Obama will feel he has political capital to push Israel…. I don’t think it will mean anything in the end, but the piece is still a step forward for the mainstream. Kristof excerpts:
[T]he American House of Representativesvoted 407 to 6 to call on the Obama administration to use its diplomatic capital to try to block the [Palestinian statehood] initiative, while also threatening to cut the Palestinians’ funding if they proceeded to seek statehood.
Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks, more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, along with 13 Israelis, according to B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights group. As Gazan blood flowed, the House, by a vote of 390 to 5, hailed the invasion as “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Such Congressional tomfoolery bewilders our friends and fritters away our international capital. It also encourages the intransigence of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reduces the chance of a peace settlement.
In the last few years, a former government official named Jeremy Ben-Ami has been trying to change the political dynamic in Washington with a new organization…
Ben-Ami argues that “the loudest eight percent” have hijacked Jewish groups to press for policies that represent neither the Jewish mainstream nor the best interests of Israel.
Some see this influence of Jewish organizations on foreign policy as unique and sinister, but Congress often surrenders to loudmouths…
Meet Debbie Schlussel, who says Norway’s ‘HAMAS Youth’ got what was coming to them
Aug 05, 2011
Paul Mutter
One of Pamela Geller’s cohorts, Debbie Schlussel, has explicitly stated that those killed at Utoya got what was coming to them because they were “HAMAS Youth” and (at the same time) “Fatah PLO” terrorists.
Schlussel may not be as well-known as Geller (perhaps because Schlussel has not exercised a leading role in anything as prominent as the “Ground Zero Mosque” furor), but she is a politically active Republican and more mainstream than Geller because she is also a culture writer with a strong media presence. (Not that she separates this work from her anti-Islamic campaign – she has criticized the film industry for not doing enough to portray Islam “correctly”).
Her opinion on the Norway terror attacks can be summed up with these quotes taken from her ongoing screeds against the terror victims:
“Based on these pics, seems like he’s [Glenn Beck’s] spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers.
But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support . . . .
Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik . . . .
I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.”
Far stronger words than Geller was willing to use. But they are par for the course as far as Schlussel is concerned.
Her prominence derives from her utility to the male conservative-dominated anti-Islamic movement. The fact that she is a woman (and also the daughter of Holocaust survivors) speaking out against Islam gives greater credence to an ideological group whose most well-known speakers are white Christian males like Newt Gingrich, Geert Wilders and Pat Robertson (the movement is, as a whole, dominated by sociopolitically conservative men, although many are not Christians).
Gingrich and Robertson, for instance, denounce Islamic attitudes towards women, while still being hostile to “feminism” under the cloak of “family values.” Having women on their anti-Islamic bandwagon helps prove their “point” about Islamic backwardness and their moral righteousness, which is a combination of faux-progressivism (treating Geller and Schlussel as intellectual co-equals) and paternalism (evoking Orientalist images of rapacious Muslim brutes). A similar logic animates the GOP embrace of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Michele Bachmann. Schlussel and Geller, among others, are useful for the right (while at the same time, they castigate individuals on the left for being Islam’s “useful idiots”).
But back to Schlussel’s own anti-Islamic agenda. Before this most recent denunciation of insufficiently Zionist individuals, she famously responded to Osama bin Laden’s death by quipping “1 down, 1.8 billion to go.” When a family of West Bank settlers were murdered earlier this year, she approvingly quoted PM Netanyahu’s son’s remarks that “terror has a religion and it is Islam” and “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
Schlussel is an ardent Zionist – Hamas and Fatah are basically the same thing, in her analysis, and are dedicated to ending Israel forever. With this in mind, few individuals or institutions are pro-Israel enough for her: Republican Governor Chris Christie, for instance, is “Hamas GOP” because he appointed Pakistani-AmericanSohail Mohammed, a Muslim attorney who defended individuals (including Hamas supporters) that the federal government sought to extradite from the U.S. after 9/11, to the NJ State Supreme Court. Whole Foods is “anti-Israel” because it sells fair trade products from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank and has dared to wish its customers a good Ramadan (there is ill-intent behind this marketing ploy, of course). And, like Robert Spencer and Pat Robertson, she believes that mainstream media is “anti-American” (and thus, anti-Western) and panders to Islam because it is anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-Western.
Both Congressmen Ron Paul (who has called for a U.S. withdraw from the Middle East and an end to the US$3 billion in aid Washington sends Israel annually) and Dennis Kucinich (who condemned the Israeli assault on the first Freedom Flotilla) are “for” Hamas, according to Schlussel. That a libertarian who caucuses with the GOP and one of the most lefit-wing members of the Democratic Party are somehow colluding to advance Hamas’s agenda is well within the realm of possibility for Schlussel: either you are with Israel (and the West – which, by extension, means you’re “with” civilization), or against it. For Schlussel, no Muslim can ever be “for” those things.
As Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch asked in its coverage of her work, why did Schlussel even bothersaying that she doesn’t support Anders Breivik when she says that “I can’t feel sorry for those who support my would-be assassins. And I don’t get too upset when they face the karma that is their fate.”
<The author would like to thank Mondoweiss’s readers for bringing Schlussel’s response to his attention>.
Code Pink confronts Howard Berman on boycott (and makes Hava Nagila anti-Zionist)
Aug 05, 2011
annie
Iran, Hamas, and the Holocaust = justification for apartheid
Aug 05, 2011
Joseph Glatzer
Many of you may have seen the hilarious “XtraNormal” videos on YouTube such as One Professor’s Fantasy, So You Want to go to Law School, and my personal favorite So you Want to Get a PHD in Political Science. Well, I was watching a few of these funny videos the other day and several new ones popped up. One was called Israel Apartheid Week. I got my hopes up that it would be in support of IAW. Boy was I wrong. The author of this one is “HonestReportingVideo” which sounds like an Israel lobby astroturfing group if I ever saw one.
The character in the video tells the foolish child who wants to protest Israel apartheid how ignorant he really is. He makes it clear that Israel is not an apartheid state because there are “Arab members of the government in Israel” and “Did you know that Arabs and Jews are both patients and doctors in all Israeli hospitals?” (there were a few black doctors during Jim Crow also.)
Naturally such nonsense propaganda bothered me, so I set out to create my own video using the XtraNormal software. This is the result: A Conversation About Israeli Apartheid.
Listening to the voices on ‘Arutz Sheva’
Aug 05, 2011
R. Taylor
Many years ago as I wandered around the British left, a veteran campaigner gave me some advice. “Don’t just read what the left says,” he told me. “Read what the opposition writes; you will learn much more.” I began to leaf through the Daily Telegraph, The Times, even trying to decipher the financial pages. He was right; I did learn a great deal.
Now I am immersed in Israel/Palestine I still follow that advice. It means I read a good deal of nasty stuff. Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me cry; sometimes I want to throw the laptop across the room. But the reward (if it can be termed that) is a greater understanding of the Zionist mindset, from Fort Lauderdale to the West Bank.
A regular read is the website Arutz Sheva/Channel 7, the voice of the settler movement. It is rife with unpleasant anti-Arab sentiment as one might expect, the Comments in particular.
The other day I was interested to see how Arutz Sheva readers would react to the news of the Israeli Supreme Court’s reaffirmation of the decision that Migron settlement outpost should be removed. The news was reported, of course, and below is an exchange of messages from the Comments section.
Well we always knew the high court was anti-Jewish Sarah, Jerusalem (2/8/11)
A Jewish court anti-Jewish ? Please explain. David, Manchester (2/8/11)
I’m an American Jew. The Israel Supreme Court is a mockery of a true court. Its anti-Semitic legal hooliganism in trying to force areas to be (once again) Judenrein are a well-trodden path to genocide and constitute triable Crimes Against Humanity which are forbidden to be implemented and which may be prosecuted by any honest State. Since the ‘judges’ undoubtedly would not accept Jerusalem as the venue for their trial, may I suggest they be prosecuted in Krakow, Frankfurt, or Nurenberg?! B. Gold, Ft. Lauderdale (2/8/11)
An arab beast can do what they want, but a Jew – NEVER! Only nazis and their ilk are like that. So I guess, by definition, the judges must be ….As our leftist leaders say and preach, these vermin should have their hands and heads broken! Shalom Kolodny, Jerusalem (2/8/11)
Open the eyes of our hearts Lord! There are many anti-jewish things concerning of all governments. Israel is not exempt! It is sad that our eyes will only be open most likely after it is too late to close this door of Pandora’s box in all of Human History. The one who will suffer the most is again the Jewish people. You would think with the surrounding thousands of Square miles that perhaps building communities would not be a hard thing to do. But again it is always every seemingly policy! Karla, Otsego,MI USA (2.8.11)
the courts are not Jewish, they are Israeli…. Jews would not act as such ann, shomron (2/8/11)
Historian asks Netanyahu about Zionism and colonialism
Aug 05, 2011
Philip Weiss
From a July 15 letter from Lenni Brenner, American historian, to Prime Minister Netanyahu. Brenner has circulated his letter widely, Jeff Blankfort gave it to me:
I must now question you re Jabotinsky’s most important writing, his 1923 article, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” so that Americans can at least have a clearer perspective on the Zionist aspect of the Middle East’s politics. As I know you are busy, I’ll wait seven days for your reply, and then circulate this note and your reply over the internet. If you don’t reply, I’ll circulate this note and an English translation of The Iron Wall. In either case, Americans will have a clearer historical perspective re the Likud’s politics.
Jabotinsky defined Zionism as a colonizing movement. There are 14 usages of “colonisation,” “colonists,” “the Jewish colonist,” etc., in the article. He insisted that “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population –- behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that an outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.”
You frequently use Jabotinsky’s term, the iron wall. How do you, today
in 2011, evaluate Jabotinsky’s 1923 article? Is it still valid? In what
ways is it out of date? Was Zionism indeed a colonial movement in 1923?
Is it still a colonial movement?
I look forward to your answers to these questions and your further
comments about Jabotinsky’s article.
The case against circumcision
Aug 05, 2011
Matthew Taylor
Alan Dershowitz’s flippant, dismissive remarks about male genital mutilation (aka circumcision) are infuriating, but an apropos Freudian slip. From where I sit, military Zionism shares a lot in common with this barbaric practice. Both involve inflicting violence against an oppressed victim without regard to his/their wishes, rendering the oppressed a voiceless object, an ‘It’ as opposed to a ‘Thou.’
I’m 37, and have been sitting on a mountain of grief and rage for 17 years, since I discovered what was stolen from me while reading a critique of circumcision in a hip, underground, alternative Jewish newspaper I found at a campus Hillel, of all places.
Most circumcision advocates don’t know the first thing about what a foreskin is and what its purpose is in human sexuality. Did you know that a foreskin increases pleasure for both a man and his partner? Did you know that a foreskin contains tens of thousands of fine touch nerve receptors found nowhere else in the male genitalia, covers and protects the head (glans) of the penis, and creates a pleasure-inducing gliding mechanism? Did you know that circumcision removes the most sensitive and pleasurable parts of the male penis?
Most adult circumcised men I’ve spoken to are reluctant to discuss this topic and get highly defensive about it, saying, “Hey, my penis is perfectly fine. My sex life is great.” If you don’t have a foreskin, you don’t know what you’re missing, Tricking yourself into thinking your sex life is all it could be (when it’s not) is a very bad reason to continue inflicting this cruelty on future generations.
Think of it this way: if there was a ritual surgery performed at birth that removed a child’s ability to see in color, the world would still be beautiful in black-and-white. But why should your son’s ability to see in color be taken away just because yours was? Sex in black-and-white is good, but sex in color is much better.
It’s well documented that one of the primary drives for circumcision, in both Jewish and gentile communities, was to dampen sexual pleasure. Moses Maimonides, the famed medieval Jewish rabbi, physician and philosopher, wrote, “One of the reasons for circumcision is to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question.” Shouldn’t that choice be left to the man whose body it is, not inflicted upon him when he’s a defenseless baby?
Much like military Zionism, circumcision is promoted on the back of a load of bald faced lies. Consider “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Its analogs are “circumcision makes the penis cleaner,” “circumcision reduces your chance of catching an STD,” and the shopworn “God commands us to do this” (just like God allegedly promised us this land exclusively, and ordered us to ethnically cleanse it of non-Jews.) None of these statements are true, and I shudder at the necessity of debunking them, but debunk them I must, as I can only assume many readers of this blog have been brainwashed about circumcision as I was as a child, and are perhaps reading a rebuttal of the myths for the first time.
“Circumcision makes the penis cleaner” – Let’s apply some common sense here. Virtually no European men are circumcised. Is there rampant gangrene in Europe? No. Intact male genitals are as easy to clean as a female’s.
“Circumcision reduces your chance of catching an STD” – Again, Europe and common sense are our allies. Why is it that in uncut Europe, STD rates are lower than in circumcised America? Regardless, are infants at risk of catching STDs? Shouldn’t decisions about how to practice safe sex be left to grown men? Condoms and responsible sexual choices prevent STDs, not genital mutilation.
“God commands us to perform circumcision” – In the Torah, God also commands us to stone people to death, burn animal sacrifices, and take slaves from neighboring nations. Jews have given up those unholy practices, why shouldn’t we give this one up too? The majority of Swedish Jews are intact, and guess what? They’re still Jewish! Judaism, whether a cultural, ethnic, or religious identity, does not require circumcision. Jewishness is solely defined by parental lineage or conversion, not by genital cutting. Today, there are Jewish baby welcoming ceremonies for all genders free from genital cutting.
In addition to significantly reducing a grown man’s capacity for sexual pleasure, circumcision is a highly risky, unnecessary surgery that results in over 100 infant fatalities every year in the U.S., and leaves countless others with highly disfigured genitals in so-called “botched” circumcisions. In one famous case,David Reimer committed suicide because of his grief over his lack of a penis, the result of a botched circumcision.
My entire argument boils down to one thing: It should have been my choice, and it should be the choice of every man/boy whose body it is — not the parents. I have no objection to a man who’s reached the age of consent choosing circumcision or any other permanent body modification for himself. But that choice must be preserved, not stolen.
Parents who defend circumcision by saying “It’s a personal choice” – I encounter that argument all the time in my work as an intactivist – are quite delusional to think they should have the right to choose to amputate healthy tissue from a non-consenting minor. They wouldn’t do that to their daughters, why should they have the right to inflict such a human rights violation on their sons?
I stand against sexual abuse, child abuse, genital mutilation, and torture, all of which are accurate – and I meant that logically, according to the precise dictionary definitions of those terms – descriptors of the anachronistic practice euphemestically called ‘circumcision.’ The very fact that our culture is so proud of judging African tribes as barbaric for practicing ‘female genital mutilation,’ while the mainstream media never uses the term ‘male genital mutilation’ to describe what routinely happens here, says a lot. Hint: In Europe, they think we’re as twisted and barbaric as we think the tribes in Africa are. Fortunately, circumcision rates are falling in the U.S., from a peak of higher than 80% in the 1970s to around 33% today.
According to a 1996 U.S. federal law, it is illegal to perform any act of genital cutting on a non-consenting minor female, even variants of circumcision that are far less invasive and damaging than the typical male circumcision. It’s illegal in this country to even prick a clitoral hood and draw a tiny drop of blood from a baby girl for religious purposes, or for any purpsose! I want to see the same legal protections extended to baby boys. In San Francisco, efforts are underway to ban circumcision within city limits, although unfortunately a judge struck it from the ballot – I hope that an appeal will be successful. I see the anti-circumcision movement as being where the gay rights movement was 40 years ago, and I hope it doesn’t take that long to catch up. The organized Jewish community presents a significant barrier to this effort, just as they do in the quest for Palestinian rights.
Back to Mr. Dershowitz. He said:
And the first thing you have to do is have all these guys who are circumcized demand it back, go to the hospital, and have it sewn back on. That’ll make them complete pricks, instead of the pricks that they are, O.K.?
If I could sue the doctor who cut me (unfortunately I’m past the statute of limitations), or wave a magic wand and regenerate what I lost, believe me I would. But since I can’t do either of those things, I’m restoring. It doesn’t give me back everything that your allies in the penis mutilation industry stole from me, and it doesn’t provide justice for the crime, but it does make a big difference.
And I’ll tell you what Mr. Dershowitz, circumcision has something in common with military, apartheid Zionism: both belong in the dustbin of history. Someday –someday! – Palestinians and Israelis will live together as equals, and someday baby boys will enjoy the same human rights baby girls already do in this country, namely, freedom from non-consensual genital cutting. I wonder if your fear that we’ll ask for our foreskins back is an analogue to your fear of ethnically cleansed Palestinians demanding their right of return.
(An aside: The fact that circumcision is widely practiced by Muslims, American gentiles, and others doesn’t let Dershowitz and his pro-mutilation allies off the hook. Worldwide, 75% of men are intact, putting the circumcision camp in a dwindling minority.)
For more info, check out my resources page.
P.S. – Mr. Dershowitz, if you’re reading this, I challenge you to a public debate about circumcision. I’ll win. All I need is one legal, constitutional argument: it’s calledEqual Protection. Thus, if this law were ever challenged at the Supreme Court level, it would have to be amended to outlaw male genital mutilation, too. Maybe you’d get used to Brit Shaloms instead, I hear they’re quite enjoyable for everyone involved – especially the baby.
Tough language
Aug 05, 2011
Philip Weiss
I surely batten on to Terry Gross a lot, because she’s so good and smart, and revered, and because her foreign-policy views are actually not very progressive. The other day she was interviewing Al Qaeda maven Peter Bergen on Fresh Air and said:
GROSS: There’s quite a level of distrust now between Pakistan and the U.S. Pakistan, it’s my understanding that the government and the military really resent that the U.S. went and raided bin Laden’s home and took him out without letting the Pakistani authorities know that this was going to happen.